The Royal Society’s Toned Down Climate Stance

LONDON, 30 September – The Global Warming Policy Foundation has welcomed the Royal Society’s decision to revise and tone down its position on climate change. Its new climate guide is an improvement on their more alarmist 2007 pamphlet which caused an internal rebellion by more than 40 fellows of the Society and triggered a review and subsequent revisions.

The former publication gave the misleading impression that the ‘science is settled’ – the new guide accepts that important questions remain open and uncertainties unresolved. “The Royal Society now also agrees with the GWPF that the warming trend of the 1980s and 90s has come to a halt in the last 10 years,” said Dr Benny Peiser, the Director of the GWPF.

Dr David Whitehouse, the science editor of the GWPF said: “The biggest failing of the new guide is that it dismisses temperature data prior to 1850 as limited and leaves it at that. It would cast a whole new light on today’s warming if the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Bronze Age Warm Period were as warm as today, possiblity even warmer than today. A thorough discussion of the growing empirical evidence for the global existence of the Medieval Warm Period and its implications would have been a valuable addition to the new report.”

In their old guide, the Royal Society demanded that governments should take “urgent steps” to cut CO2 emissions “as much and as fast as possible.” This political activism has now been replaced by a more sober assessment of the scientific evidence and ongoing climate debates.

“If this voice of moderation had been the Royal Society’s position all along, its message to Government would have been more restrained and Britain’s unilateral climate policy would not be out of sync with the rest of the world,” Dr Peiser said.

Climate change continues to be a subject of intense public and political debate. Because of the level of interest in the topic the Royal Society has produced a new guide to the science of climate change. The guide summarises the current scientific evidence on climate change and its drivers, highlighting the areas where the science is well established, where there is still some debate, and where substantial uncertainties remain.

The document was prepared by a working group chaired by Professor John Pethica, Vice President of the Royal Society and was approved by the Royal Society Council.

Contrary to what is reported above, guide says that global warming has continued every decade since the 1970’s, including 2000 to 2009. While the report acknowledges the inability to model cloud cover, it still leaves the impression that models/modelling are somehow useful. Fear is generated that there is no turning back from current levels of warmness even while including a doubt laced acknowledgement that similar to the present warm periods have been experienced in the recent past. This guide is an improvement, but it is still laden with inuendo and fear mongering that betrays its real purpose, i.e. to maintain support for the AGW industry.

I quite like this new report. However, nothing I can see supports Dr. Peiser’s claim that the “warming trend of the 1980s and 90s has come to a halt in the last 10 years”. Quite the opposite, in fact:

“When these surface temperatures are averaged over periods of a decade, to remove some of the year-to-year variability, each decade since the 1970s has been clearly warmer (given known uncertainties) than the one immediately preceding it. The decade 2000-2009 was, globally, around 0.15oC warmer than the decade 1990-1999.”

Well, there’s some interesting stuff, some harmless stuff, some stuff we can all agree with, but other stuff that will cause further squawking. For example:

45 Because of the thermal expansion of the ocean, it is very likely that for many centuries the rate of global sea-level rise will be at least as large as the rate of 20 cm per century that has been observed over the past century. Paragraph 49 discusses the additional, but more uncertain, contribution to sea-level rise from the melting of land ice.

49 There is currently insufficient understanding of the enhanced melting and retreat of the ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica to predict exactly how much the rate of sea level rise will increase above that observed in the past century (see paragraph 45) for a given temperature increase. Similarly, the possibility of large changes in the circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean cannot be assessed with confidence. The latter limits the ability to predict with confidence what changes in climate will occur in Western Europe.

Also, while the word “cooling” is used twice, there is no mention of medium scale climate change related to the PDO or AMO. The tenor seems to be steady warming over the previous and next century with minor deviations due to volcanoes.

Many of the statements are pretty much lifted from (or paraphrased versions of) the IPCC AR4; so the crowing of the media (like the Daily Mail) looks ridiculous in this context: by supporting this report they are supporting the IPCC AR4 they have attacked so often in the past!

I like how it splits up findings into different levels of ‘consensus’, but I think it is missing some more discussion on observational/palaeo methods to calculate climate sensitivity. There are plenty of them about!

Thanks Zeke, when I saw that “warming trend of the 1980s and 90s has come to a halt in the last 10 years” I thought the Royal Society may have gone nuts. Looks like Dr Benny Peiser was just making that bit up.

Zeke Hausfather says: I quite like this new report. However, nothing I can see supports Dr. Peiser’s claim that the “warming trend of the 1980s and 90s has come to a halt in the last 10 years”

I think this refers to this:“This warming has not been gradual, but has been largely concentrated in two periods, from around 1910 to around 1940 and from around 1975 to around 2000.

The warming has largely occurred in these periods clearly indicates that warming has not been significant outwith these periods, which given the end date of 2000 clearly confirms the assertion that there has been no significant warming recently! (it has cooled this century!!!!!!!)

Zeke,
I think it is misleading to say that warming is continuing because the decade 1990-1999 was not as warm as the decade 2000-2009. Theoretically, if the shape of those decades was an upside down V with the peak of the V occuring in the last year of 1990-99 and first year of 2000-09, it would be inaccurate to say that the trend continued as the trend reversed at the peak of the upside down V. This is still true even if the averages of the two decades show the latter one to warmer.

In our case, global temperatures hit a peak in 1998 and have since leveled out (no noticeable increases or decreases). Since this decade started out at a higher level than the early 1990s, of course the average is higher, but that does not mean the temperature is still increasing.

This, in itself, does not prove or disprove AGW, but we’d be a lot better off if both sides could agree that global temperatures have not shown significant increases or decreases since 1997-1998.

Ok so it’s a bit better than before, but still full of scaremongering and side stepping of key factors. Eg, it mentions the 1910/1940 warming, but in a way that implies it was a warming on the way to the 1970/1990 warming, ie a step up to it. Does this by not mentioning the cooling after 1940. Then side steps the possibility of current cooling by comparing decades – we know that 2000 – 2009 was warm, but trends are ignored.
Also, ignores the pre 1850 temp issues. Also, assumes the CO2 concentrations from ice cores – essentially proxy measurements – are undisputed: no mention of the chemical analyses. And assumes the surface temp sets are reasonably accurate. No discussion of water vapour/evaaporation/precipitation as a cooling/heat distribution mechanism, and etc etc etc across many aspect.
4/10 in my book; and quite unhelpful really. Still, a step back from “the science is settled and were all going to die”, but not much. Maybe next time the step back will be bigger…. but what a waste of resources and wrong policy impacts meantime!

“This guide is an improvement, but it is still laden with inuendo and fear mongering that betrays its real purpose, i.e. to maintain support for the AGW industry.”

Absolutely, sir. Our duty is to take them point-by-point and teach them what they still do not know. Now, we know that there are open minds within the Royal Society who are open to what we have to say. Lawson’s group deserves praise. By the way, the inuendo and fear mongering amounts to soft pitches that folks should hit out of the park. I would offer my own point-by-point analysis right away, but this darn day job nags the heck out of me.

Very disappointing! Marginally better than the previous report but both the introduction and concluding remarks shows they are still wedded to the AGW hypothesis.
No thermometer records before 1850, no proxy and historical evidence of various temp. fluctuations in the last 2000 years,no mention of CO2 levels in geological time scales, limited exploration of alternative explanations for 0.8C temp. rise etc.
Still fixated with ‘sophisticated’ climate models with their ‘approximations’ and ‘parameterisations’ aka guesses.
Nothing here, sadly, to prevent or dissuade our politicians on both sides of the pond from building windmills and other ways of destroying our economies and redistributing wealth (hard work) to the developing countries.
Ironic that the UK govt. is about to slash ‘Defence’ with an ongoing war and other potential but likely threats while simultaneously wasting untold millions on mitigating a non-existent threat.
On a brighter note, the Ryder Cup starts tomorrow in ‘sunny’ Wales at the Celtic Manor G.C. Don’t miss it.
BTW there is a reason we are a green little country and we supply most of the water for Birmingham, Warwickshire not Alabama.

I wonder what Tom Edison would have to say about the Company he founded having a part in writing a Government reg that removed (one of) his inventions from the marketplace?

One wonder what “sceptikal chemyst” Robert Boyle, who helped found the Royal Society and demanded evidence for anything anybody claimed would have to say about the mealy-mouthed Government rubber stamp for British regulation the Royal Society has become?

Few people who look at the data would argue that there has been much of a warming trend for the specific period from 1998 to present (though, depending on the data set, one could conclude that there has been a large warming trend since 2002). The more important questions are 1) is the last 10 years inconsistent with the trend and distribution of temperatures over the past three decades (no) and 2) is it inconsistent with projections of climate models (possibly yes to the multi-model mean, but no to the range of projections from individual runs).

However, that is a lot more nuanced than simply saying “the warming trend of the 1980s and 90s has come to a halt in the last 10 years”. In fact, if I had created an empirical forecast using data available from 1975 to 1997, I would have underestimated the warmth of the last decade. See http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2009/08/warmest-by-fair-margin/ for example.

As far as the Royal Society position paper goes, it could have been mostly lifted from the WGI SPM from the latest IPCC report. Its not necessarily activist in its policy prescriptions (though neither is WGI really), but I don’t see anything there that seems particularly novel or controversial.

Having read the report I concur with many comments – yes it is better than before, but it is still ‘glossing’ over many important points and I suspect the ‘review’ type nature of the document (rather than a detailed scientific review) was deliberately intended to allow important points to be bypassed for closer inspection!

Did anyone notice how many folk were involved – and they spent several months producing this blase report? Hmm – methinks this a kind of temporary device to try and beef up the failing AGW campaign during all the recent hiatus!
generally, am not impressed, grade C-; could do better!

Dr T G Watkins says: “Nothing here, sadly, to prevent or dissuade our politicians on both sides of the pond from building windmills and other ways of destroying our economies and redistributing wealth (hard work) to the developing countries.
Ironic that the UK govt. is about to slash ‘Defence’ with an ongoing war and other potential but likely threats while simultaneously wasting untold millions on mitigating a non-existent threat.”

Let’s put it another way. The UK renewables “industry” (aka scam) steals around £1billion from our electricity bills each and every year. That is some £5billion of unearned, undeserved unwarranted income which any sensible government in a time of economic cuts is going to prune. After all, when every other area of spending, when every other area of the economy (except banks!!!) are having to pull in their belts …. why on earth are those fraudsters** who run the renewables scam in the UK getting increases in funding rather than reductions like everyone else?

**where are the 45,000 jobs that we were promised would be created if we spent £1billion/year on this scam?

I suppose it was asking too much for them to aver; ” we were wrong and the science is incorrect” and admit it was down to mainly, computer climate modelling, the (GIGO) conclusions of which have driven the hype of a dubious (MM CO2 e = global warming) hypothesis.

So the question remains when will they ever come (totally) clean and properly recant?

Pride comes before a fall, the greatest scientists possessed the humility to admit they were wrong and that, this indeed makes a person stronger.

Scientists, in dialogue and discussing their; hypotheses, experiments, results and conclusions openly is the scientific method, is it not?

What happened to the Royal Society, they have debased themselves and let down, their more famous and illustrious past fellows of the Society, for the sake of political and dogmatic expediency and in unqualified advocacy.

I’ve read through the report again following your headline but see very little ‘toning down’. The basic IPCC propaganda is restated but in a less strident tone.
A vague statement ‘unknown aspects of the climate and climate change could emerge and lead to significant modifications in our understanding’ seemed rather a sop
to the GWPF but will not alter RS thinking as they don’t intend taking any theory on-board that doesn’t have CO2 in the title.

Quite telling when you read item 47 regarding the admitted poor understanding of clouds in climate models when according to Henrik Svenson clouds and their relationship to solar effects are key to our climate. http://vimeo.com/14356185

Small wonder the RS wish to remain ignorant of Svensmark’s findings as it invalidates everything they stand for.

Perhaps we should cheer the sinner’s return towards sanity, but belief in the usefulness of climate models, in the IPCC’s estimates of sensitivity, the reliability of the data and lots else in the dogma remains intact.

This is no Damascene moment. At best it is one small step on what for the Royal Society will be a long road back towards its former scientific credibility

10:10 Campaign – What on earth are they thinking!!!!
Is that really supposed to persuade people!

Stay with it until 1min 10 seconds, and the red button..
(a school setting, of course, with children, then watch the rest, in fascinated horror, this makes the ‘Bedtime Stories’ pr video, look like a .. bedtime story)

In September 2008, the Royal Society’s Director of Education Michael Reiss suggested that, rather than dismissing creationism without discussing it, teachers should take the time to explain why creationism had no scientific basis.[36] His views were presented in some media reports as lending support to teaching creationism as a valid scientific theory, but both he and the Royal Society later stated that this was a misrepresentation.[37][38] Reiss resigned within days.[39]

I suppose CAGW skepticism is a little easier to accept for the Society than discussing the theory of Creationism.

The Royal Society has forever soiled its nest, which should never be forgotten for future generations. Did you ever read the nonsense they wrote, now removed from their website? Well, here it is, saved and rebutted forever.http://www.seafriends.org.nz/issues/global/royalsoc.htm
– lest we forget.

“guide says that global warming has continued every decade since the 1970′s, including 2000 to 2009.”

According to the NOAA’s State of the Climate Report 2008 that was released in 2009, after removing ENSO the trend was 0.00c (+/-.05) for the decade 1999-2008.
So yeah it was warmer than the previous decade, but it was also attributed entirely to ENSO.

“There is strong evidence that changes in greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activity are the dominant cause of the global warming that has taken place over the last half century. This warming trend is expected to continue as are changes in precipitation over the long term in many regions. Further and more rapid increases in sea level are likely which will have profound implications for coastal communities and ecosystems.”

“the science is settled” only a maroon or a former VP would have thought that. Evidently there are a lot of maroons in this world, some of which inhabit societies as well as a few of those that post here.

I would be a little bit surprised if it started off to say, “This document completely debunks the so-called ‘science’ behind IPCC alarmism and exposes the fraudulent East Anglia climate analysis activity that was revealed in their own emails.”

1. re par 22:
“When these surface temperatures are averaged over periods of a decade, to remove some of the year-to-year variability, each decade since the 1970s has been clearly warmer (given known uncertainties) than the one immediately preceding it. The decade 2000-2009 was, globally, around 0.15oC warmer than the decade 1990-1999.”
(Note: Holdren made the same point in his Kalvi presentation)

I don’t have access to the data, nor am I very good with a spreadsheet, but I wonder what the impact on the above finding (and implication thereof) of changing the endpoints of the averaging might have.

2. Close reading of paragraphs 37 and 38 (Attribution of Climate Change) suggests that the conclusions drawn therein depend upon the accuracy of the surface temperature record. Paragraph 20 notes that “analyses of these data (surface temperature record),…. TRY to take into account” various factors that introduce error and uncertainty into the surface temperature record, but no where do we have any acknowledgement of the impact of the errors/uncertainty in measurement, adjustment, averaging, gridding, etc. have on these conclusions. If the surfacestation.org project documents potential error in 70% of the “high quality” USHCN sites at > 2 deg. C, how can the estimate of o.8 deg C (+/- 0.2 deg) rise since 1850 have any credibility? If the measured temperature rise is inaccurate, don’t the attributions of climate change suggested in paragraphs 37 and 38 fail?

Prominent sceptics had better start taking full credit for pulling the world back from the brink of a repeat of the Dark Ages before the consensus completes its rehabilitation and becomes the “new” face of science. It wasn’t only climate science that was involved … Physicists, glaciologists, oceanographers, astronomers, botanists, chemists, economists, psychiatrists, sociologists, biologists, agronomists,… (thankfully there were fewer geologists than the average composition of the group and meteorologists too populated sceptical ranks). But in any case there is a big mess to clean up in science and it should be the subject of a formal conference of untainted scientists and those who offer sincere mea culpas. Scientists must adopt an oath of allegiance to honesty, truth and the scientific method and a code of ethics of the same kind that engineers and medical doctors have. It includes passing an exam in ethics. On the agenda should also be a plan to have scientific journals registered and to adopt a code of ethics, independence from undue influence, and a strict adherence to rules regarding archiving of data necessary to replicate research. Peer review must be overhauled to include wider internet review of both scientific work and of the reviewers’ reviews. No longer should reviewers be anonomous. It was a long ago time when a person’s word was his bond or a handshake was a contract (it still is for me and you and you, but I’ll submit to the new requirements).

A few of the links forging the new chain of reason in climate science:

link 1 – IAC showing the IPCC bias for not including skeptic content and showing lack of scientific rigor.

link 2 – The release of the CRU emails showing manipulation by high level climate scientists to bias the input to the IPCC toward AGW.

link 3 – IPCC chairman Pachari’s ineffective / non-professional behavior and questions about his ethics in the area of financial gains from his AGW policies as IPCC chairman.

link 4 – Conclusion that Mann’s hockey stick is an intentional manipulation of data to show recent industrial era warming is unprecedented in the last 1000 years.

link 5 – MSM’s overselling of catastrophe and urgency. With no balanced reporting and saying the science is settled ad nauseum . . . . people do smell a rat. People know life is not settled . . . . .

link 6 – The unprofessional and biased handling of all major LST datasets. There is mishandling by scientists paid by public money.

link 7 – Open policy advocacy in public by the scientists who are responsible for providing objective scientific products with public money.

link 8 – The curious case of no policy being seriously considered that is predominately capitalistic. The policies seriously being considered are all basically authoritarian gov’t based . . . . a popular term for that is socialist. Wow, given the amount of capitalism in the world versus socialism you would think some of the solutions would be capitalist. Curious, wonder why none are?

link 8 – The erosion of public trust in climate science over the past year or so. The informed consumers aren’t buying those catastrophic/apocalyptic products anymore. The uninformed consumers are becoming, via the blogosphere, informed very quickly that there is reason to be cautious about wild catastrophe claims. Note: I think this is the urgency for supporters of AGW, time is running out for them. Probably already has run out.

link 9 – More and more skeptical papers are getting through the previously biased publication processes. Thanks to the persistence and integrity of those independent thinkers.

link 10 – The politicians sense the change of the wind on climate AGW support. See link 8 above. These guys are professional wind sniffers of the highest level . . . .

Zeke changed his screen name link to Lucia’s blog from the Yale Forum where he still posts warmist oriented articles all the time. The Yale Forum is kept financially afloat by payments from a hard-left, cAGW alarmist NGO, the Grantham Foundation. The Yale Forum has a big thank you note on its home page:

The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media is grateful for the generous financial support of the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment

That background should be kept in mind when reading the alarming talk of 0.15 degrees warming in only a decade. That’s cherry-picking one 10-year period. But that’s not the real story. Phil Jones himself stated that two recent warming cycles, of 0.15 degrees and 0.16 degrees have happened with the same warming ramping up within a decade. Then the climate cooled, retracing the warming. Phil Jones also admitted that there hasn’t been any statistically meaningful warming for the past fifteen years.

The Royal Society must know that if carbon dioxide had a big effect (a high sensitivity) on temperature then the temperature wouldn’t cycle up and down when co2 was steadily rising, it would closely follow co2. But the temperature has cycled even more extremely when co2 was very low and unchanging for thousands of years. If co2 has a small effect on temperature, or even no effect, then we’d expect to see just what we’re seeing because the same temperature cycles happened over and over before co2 ever started to rise.

Like many other formerly reputable organizations the Royal Society has lost its way. That makes the protest of the 40 FRS members commendable, and very courageous.

Surface temperatures are a lousy way of determining if Earth is still absorbing net energy, there’s too much noise to determine if the warming over 10 or 15 years periods is statistically significant (a point Phil Jones made that was widely misrepresented).
Better measures of energy change are Dr Spencer’s tropospheric temperature measurements and sea level change.

While the summary provides only cursory treatment of some issues where confidence is low or knowledge is poor, overall I would say that the report accomplishes some good in that it sets precedence for other science societies to revise their statements and come down off their imminent planet crisis platforms. The language of alarmism has been greatly toned down and uncertainties did gain greater focus in the summary.

Consensus is not changed quickly but is a slow process of realization that what is accepted knowledge may be different from fact (reality). The philosopher Richard Kirkham offered perhaps the most concise definition of knowledge. It is where the “justification for the belief must be infallible.” If any doubt exists or the belief is built on pseudo-evidence, the knowledge cannot be sustained and cannot be held as fact.

There are many doubts that exist in the underpinnings of the theory of AGW which will serve to demand more reasonable judgement as compared to the hand wringing, wailing, and gnashing of teeth fostered by alarmists seeking significance. I see this report as evidence that reality is starting to dawn in prominent science halls although it is an early dawn and not much light is yet shed.

Let’s see how people reflect on the Royal society after another UK winter. Will it be out of touch with reality or right in sync with the real world? At the end of the day, rigging data and claims of models showing warming isn’t going to mean anything if people are skating on the Thames again.

“Zeke Hausfather says:
September 30, 2010 at 11:34 am
I quite like this new report. However, nothing I can see supports Dr. Peiser’s claim that the “warming trend of the 1980s and 90s has come to a halt in the last 10 years”. Quite the opposite, in fact:

“When these surface temperatures are averaged over periods of a decade, to remove some of the year-to-year variability, each decade since the 1970s has been clearly warmer (given known uncertainties) than the one immediately preceding it. The decade 2000-2009 was, globally, around 0.15oC warmer than the decade 1990-1999.”

What the alarmists never mention, even though it is significant when comparing decade upon decade warming, is that Mount Pinatubo erupted in the 1990s. This was the second biggest volcanic eruption of the 20th century and had a significant cooling effect on the global climate for a couple of years.
The 1990-1999 decade would have averaged warmer without this eruption.

When you combine this with the fact that the temperatures at the start of the current decade were obviously high, much higher than the start of the1990s, reflecting the increase over the 1990s, then there has been no warming this decade.

Andrew W
That then leads directly to my next question. What is your opinion of the hypothesis put forward by Dr. Spencer that the feed back value is actually negative not positive that is used in virtually all climate models. (see his book for full details of the hypothesis)

Further to the troposphere. I seem to remember recently reading how the unusually low solar activity has resulted in the dramatic change in the height/thickness of the troposphere. With that in mind at what point is the measurements taken and what/how is the average determined?

Daniel H says: at 10:50 amMy first thought was: “Why is there a picture of a thresher on the cover?”

The picture doesn’t show the grain coming out of the machine but those of us of a certain age and upbringing are familiar with the operation. Being a very small child I got to hold the sack until it was full, a larger cousin would tie it, and another would drag it to the wagon. On a later model the grain exited backward onto the wagon as both were pulled through the field. That eliminated the need to cut the wheat and bring it in from the field.

The picture shows equipment that predates that used when I was small but still it shows an aluminum ladder leaning against the thresher, a nice touch, but having one of those is something I do not remember!

Jeez, I just read the thing. I have no idea what the GWPF was crowing about since the document completely and w/o question endorses the consensus view. Anthony, please put up a post highlighting where the Royal Society statement differs significantly from the IPCC. My guess is that it will be a very short post. Perhaps it will be non existent.

The phrase included the term “statistically significant”. This means that the trend (which Jones characterized as about .12C/decade) did not exceed the noise due to natural variability at the 95% level (which is commonly called, by convention, “statistically significant”). The trend over the the time period specified (1996-2009?) was significant at a greater than 90% level. The generally accepted period for assessing climate trends is 30 years, although temperature trends have been shown to be significant over *15* years. Hmm. Why was the period chosen by the reporter to ask about less than that?

The one I like particularly is his reference to the faulty logic re well-mixed man-made greenhouse gases. IR has been well covered, but there’s not much on the ‘well-mixed’ point, it’s usually dismissed by the simple, and obvious, argument that carbon Dioxide is heavier than air, but I kept getting strange answers from AGWs whenever I asked about this.

On exploring this aspect I had found not simply faulty logic, but a real lack of understanding of the concept of Carbon Dioxide being 1.5 times heavier than air. The objections to my descriptions of what this meant were quite bizarre.

When I finally decided to sort why AGWs couldn’t understanding layering of gases in mines and so on, I found they are being taught to view this ‘well-mixed in the atmosphere’ according to ideal gas laws, and this was also being taught by a PhD physicist convinced this was correct. He couldn’t understand what I was saying when I asked how a pooled amount of CO2 could rise from the ground to mix itself thoroughly in the atmosphere as he claimed it did (all conditions which existed at the pooling remaining the same), did it use a bit of blue tack to stick itself to lighter molecules and using them as a balloon to float up? Etc.

No, according to him, the CO2 would do this by bouncing off the other molecules until they were all thoroughly mixed in the atmosphere.

AGW logic claiming such things as CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds and even thousands of years as I’ve seen stated as if fact, isn’t possible in the real world. CO2 is constantly moving down, sinking through the atmosphere unless it is acted on by another force, such as wind, or is at rest, has reached its ground. Ideal gases don’t exist in the real world, but this is where all the supposed logic for AGW claims about CO2 come from.

Myrrh, I went to the BBC link that your Masterresource gives as the source of the claims it makes, I couldn’t find any of the statements you attribute to Jones. Perhaps you could quote directly from that the BBC article, showing to which answer (A to W) each of those quotes is in response to.

“The one I like particularly is his reference to the faulty logic re well-mixed man-made greenhouse gases.”
CO2 is well mixed through the troposphere, though the concentration does decline slightly with altitude. Stratospheric concentrations are significantly lower that tropospheric concentrations. This has all been measured, how the concentrations vary isn’t based on theory or models.

Myrrh.
From your link you’ll find that those comments attributed to Phil Jones have been ‘summarized’ by Indur Goklany.

As the great skeptic you obviously are, why not read what Phil Jones actually said in his Febuary interview with the BBC and quote that, rather than the (rather creative), interpretation of what he said by someone else? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm

“Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming”

“Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods. ”

E – “How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?”

“I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.

I quite like this new report. However, nothing I can see supports Dr. Peiser’s claim that the “warming trend of the 1980s and 90s has come to a halt in the last 10 years”. Quite the opposite, in fact:

“When these surface temperatures are averaged over periods of a decade, to remove some of the year-to-year variability, each decade since the 1970s has been clearly warmer (given known uncertainties) than the one immediately preceding it. The decade 2000-2009 was, globally, around 0.15oC warmer than the decade 1990-1999.”

“Quite the opposite”? The last paragraph does not logically contradict the first. I leave it to you as a mental exercise to puzzle it out.

“What happened to the Royal Society, they have debased themselves and let down, their more famous and illustrious past fellows of the Society, for the sake of political and dogmatic expediency and in unqualified advocacy.”

Perhaps we should cheer the sinner’s return towards sanity, but belief in the usefulness of climate models, in the IPCC’s estimates of sensitivity, the reliability of the data and lots else in the dogma remains intact.

This is no Damascene moment. At best it is one small step on what for the Royal Society will be a long road back towards its former scientific credibility

On the contrary, all the data show it is not well mixed, so this claim has been falsified by available data.

There are two things at play here re the ‘well-mixed’ which create immense confusion between the supporters of the AGW claims and those who give counter arguements which show that these claims are falsified.

AGW do not have any grasp of the real science in this as it relates to the real physical world because they are taught a different science to explain ‘well-mixed’, and this makes it frustrating for those in the real physical world to explain why such claims are contrary to real science unless they appreciate where this AGWScience comes from.

‘Well-mixed’ has become the AGW mantra, and there are two aspects which need to be taken into consideration in untangling any of the claims made where this is quoted.

The data show that Carbon Dioxide is not well mixed in the atmosphere; it varies seasonally, hemisphere to hemisphere, and from place to place and satellite data show this clearly. The first confusion arises because most on both sides of the arguement do not understand that the figures used in describing how much CO2 is in the atmosphere are actually, Averages. Average rainfall does not mean that this amount falls as rain in every place on every day.

There is a good explanation of the The Fallacy of the Average on this page from an AGW supporter with links to further explanation, but his comment that the majority of detractors of the Keeling curve don’t know this applies equally to the majority of those supporting it.

The second aspect, and this is more insidious as it is actually being taught as real science explanation of how gases act in the physical world, is the confusion caused by viewing CO2 as acting according to ideal gas laws. This has become so prevalent in its use that supporters of AGW have lost all sense of reality regarding CO2 in the atmosphere and have lost touch with it as the basic food in our Carbon Life Cycle, even seeing it as a pollutant and a poison. (Which is actually a third aspect here, this same PhD argued that CO2 becomes toxic when I pointed out that in real science which understood what toxicity meant, had designated it an non-toxic gas; a pillow is non-toxic and it can also kill by suffocation, as does CO2, it doesn’t suddenly become toxic the bigger it is regardless how many strange contortions of medical effects one can come up with to explain this sudden change from being non-toxic to acting as a poison.)

The argument from AGW supporters in the second aspect re well-mixed says that Carbon Dioxide behaves as an ideal gas. That it travels as a molecule of ideal gas, colliding and bouncing off other molecules without interacting with them until it diffuses into the general atmosphere of these molecules becoming well-mixed, gravity is dismissed as having so little effect that it can be discounted. So convinced are they that this happens in the real physical world that one of them went off to a cave to prove that separated gases will mix on their own accord, concluding that there must be continous source of the gas somewhere which keeps replenishing the separation faster than the gases can diffuse..

Their logic is not simply faulty because of this education, it has taken them out of the reality of the physical world working to physical science, completely. They no longer have any ‘feel’ for this physical existence. Explanations that CO2 is heavier than air and so falls through the atmosphere because it displaces oxygen are met with shock and horror that anyone can say such a thing because it is against the science they have actually been taught as relating to the physical world, because they have been taught that the world works according to ideal gas law principles. They say, for example, that if that were true there should be a layer of CO2 on the ground and anyone going to the Dead Sea area would die in this layer, but clearly as this doesn’t happen this proves that CO2 doesn’t sink through the atmosphere displacing oxygen. (From this also oblivious to the carbon life cycle, instead seeing plants only as ‘sinks’ to capture this nasty substance, rather than the source of our food and oxygen through them.) They are shown experiments where CO2 as dry ice disappears as it changes to a gaseous state and this proves they say that CO2 has diffused into the atmosphere and become well-mixed. Pointing out that CO2 is invisible and this experiment does not actually prove what they conclude, because CO2 being heavier than air sinks, is an uphill struggle.

Only those who haven’t lost touch with the physical laws of molecules as they exist in the real physical world will actually see how absurd their reasoning.

They are shocked to be told that gas molecules move at different speeds through different media, slower in liquids and even slower in solids than when in a gaseous state, because in their world all molecules move at the speed of ideal gases.

This page on the ideal gas laws also explains that real gases don’t work to these laws.

From the paragraph “Ideal and real gases”: “All four of the gas laws previously discussed apply only to ideal gases. …There is, however, one problem with this concept: there is no such thing as an ideal gas in the real world.”

This is extremely worrying in general, that the education system is creating a generation, has already created a generation, who don’t understand the basic physical laws as they relate to the actual physical world we live in; this is utterly the fault of AGW supporters and their pernicious influence. It really must be stopped.

The Royal Society knows better, that it supports this re-education of the children of the country to think in this absurd logic is a political decision, not scientific.

Tim Williams – the quotes from Phil Jones were extracted from the emails. It was certainly something I picked up on when reading them, that he was also confused by the machinations of the IPCC as he found them playing out, but in the end it makes for an easier life to accept being a pawn. He was said to be close to a nervous breakdown before the enquiry, it wouldn’t have taken much pressure to get him to conform to the party line.

The claims for AGW from and supported by government funding come out of political machinations, it has resulted in the creation of AGW as a new religion; faith in its doctrines argued in ever more absurd ways, as using ideal gas laws to explain the physical world, and detractors are those who won’t join their religion. It has united Atheists and those with otherwise disparate and incompatible beliefs about God, to the use of violent denigration of non-believers. When Atheists who believe in science and not God and claim they are open thinkers because of this view, got together and invited an old tv presenter of science to speak at one of their gatherings, they hadn’t taken into account that he would refer to real physical science and debunk AGW ideas. He was aggressively booed and driven from their company. So much for their open scientific thinking, and they didn’t see the irony.

Tim Williams – the quotes from Phil Jones were extracted from the emails.

Eh? They are not quotes from Phil Jones.
You originally linked to ‘MasterResource :A free-market energy blog’ quoting Phil Jones as having said something he didn’t say. Instead it emerges that we have a summary of what Phil Jones is supposed to have said in a BBC interview that was linked to in the article and I linked to on here. Nowhere in that interview has he actually said what is alleged.

Myrrh, thank you for your lengthy reply, you state that “there is no such thing as an ideal gas in the real world.”

You are correct, everyone knows this, it is not news.

“Well mixed” does not mean “perfectly mixed”, in any volume of mixed gases to which some components are continuously removed and added there will always be variations in the constituents concentrations at different locations, everyone, and I do mean everyone, apart from you knows and accepts this.

Please provide links to the individual emails that you claim the quotes from Phil Jones are from, the Masterresource article you take the quotes from appears to give the BBC article as the source, it does not claim the emails are the source. It still looks to me like (as Tim Williams puts it) the comments attributed to Phil Jones have been ‘summarized’ by Indur Goklany.

Re the Phil Jones, sorry, my bad. I had misread that (note to self, must not respond when in a hurry to do something else, and, I began to feel sorry for him…). It did seem to ring a bell with some things he’d said in the emails, but the Beeb interview has him covering his rear with the official party line. Re the emails. The enquiry was a cover up, like another rather dramatic incident we have where a coroner closed his inquest before his legal obligation to complete it and handed it over to an unofficial enquiry, this scientific fraud too was smothered by a enquiry designed to cover it up and all continues as if nothing untoward had ever happened. A reminder of just how important this was considered at the time: http://www.climategate.com/climategate-professor-phil-jones-could-face-ten-years-on-fraud-charges

Back to the Royal Society and those objecting to its support of this AGWScience, wasn’t there a similar incident in the meteorolical society in America? I recall a page they had up on their website which was part of their beginners course to understanding weather, said that CO2 had nothing to do with warming, it was taken down a couple of days after this got around the grapevine.

Andrew W – no, not “everyone knows this, this is not news”. I was arguing with a PhD physicist teaching this in the British education system, and as a supporter of AGW and the IPCC reports quite adamant that these ideal gas laws explained the movement of CO2 in real life, that CO2 obeyed ideal gas laws and diffused into the atmosphere according to them, bouncing off other molecules and mixing thoroughly, regardless of any other conditions. Oblivious to gravity and atmospheric pressure and now slimmed down to be able to float through the air with the greatest of ease.

Claiming, for example, that CO2 stayed up in the atmosphere for 200 years he simply couldn’t grasp my objections to this. That CO2 is 1.5 times heavier than air and physically incapable of this, unless we live in a continuous washing machine cycle, which I hadn’t noticed.. He claimed real gas molecules in the real world diffused into the atmosphere according to ideal gas laws and said he would fail students who disagreed with his understanding of molecules and thermodynamics. So how could he have been so ignorant of the physical properties of molecules? So ignorant of our real world? I don’t know how old he is, he himself could have been a product of the ‘new science’ teaching.

He and his coterie of on-line students continually berated me for not ‘not understanding this’ and referred me again and again to these laws as if real world science, urged me to find text books on it.., all the while I was trying to point out that these explanations made nonsense of the physical, real world we actually live in and against well understood, once upon a time, real science.

To them it was perfectly reasonable to imagine CO2 without weight accumulating in the atmosphere for any amount of yonks the AGWs claim it does, as being ‘well known’ and therefore real science. They really, and I do mean really, could not get their heads around the concept that CO2 was heavier than air and thus always sank through air, displacing it. That this is what was happening all the time to the CO2 in the atmosphere. This is not an isolated argument, these are the laws AGW’s use to claim CO2 is well-mixed in the atmosphere and stays up there well mixed, accumulating for thousands of years even forming a blanket and so a disaster in the making and the other nonsense espoused by AGW.

They really, truly, do not know that this isn’t real world science. That even this teacher argued that CO2 although heavier than air it would rise up and diffuse by itself into the atmosphere, claiming it would not remain pooled on the ground even if not disturbed, by wind or other, shows that this absurd argument for CO2 is so widespread, so entrenched, that it has created a generation or more of adults who have no concept of the laws relating to the physical reality of molecules in our atmosphere.

Who is teaching them that putting colouring into a glass of water shows diffusion which cannot become unmixed and so CO2 likewise diffuses through the atmosphere and stays mixed? They actually think this constitutes a proof..

There was a programme on the Beeb a while back which was going to settle this by experiment to invited sceptics in the audience and one experiment shown was heating a jar of air and heating a jar of carbon dioxide. The jar of carbon dioxide got hotter than the jar of air much more quickly. This proved conclusively that CO2 was dangerous in the atmosphere and would act as a blanket, etc.

Did they compare the constituents of the glass of air re capacity to retain heat against the jar of CO2? No they did not. Did they time how long each jar took to cool down? Nope. It was enough to show that CO2 got hotter more quickly and so was a danger and all explanations then from AGW were therefore real. I won’t be filling my radiators with it..

When you have read as many responses as I have that CO2 can do these impossible things before breakfast then you will know that the majority arguing this do not know reality, physical real science about real gases is not at all well known.

Re Phil Jones, sorry, misread it, note to self, musn’t post in a hurry. I thought it was from the emails because it rang a bell to some things he’d said in them.

Andrew W – I disagree that this is well known.

I have had considerable amount of discussions about the claims for CO2 from AGWScience, and have been astonished at the lack of understanding of basic physical science. It was only on determination to find the cause that I came to see how their arguments are based on ideal gas laws re molecules and not normal physical laws in real science, in the real world. This is why they cannot grasp that CO2 has weight and so can’t ‘diffuse back into the atmosphere’ as if it was acting like an ideal gas, why they think CO2 can stay up in the atmosphere well-mixed for hundreds and even thousands of years.

There is something strange in the land of science education for children, across continents.

Myrrh
Thanks for that clear exposition of the rapid degradation of recent Science teaching, mainly due to AGW’s demonization of CO2. Please publish for educators, even a pamphlet. Should be worthy of an article in Nature or New Scientist or BBC, and the [likely] omission thereof should also go into said pamphlet if that happens.

Please could you provide full refs for your Jones quotes, it would be helpful, do they all come from Goklany or where else?

Your post above reminded me of Prof Freeman Dyson’s example of growing corn. Dyson explains: “A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would stop growing.”

But corn does not stop growing on windless days [I was raised in Ohio, with cornfields as far as the eye could see. You can hear corn creaking and groaning as it grows even better when there is no wind]. So your comment makes sense: “CO2 is constantly moving down, sinking through the atmosphere unless it is acted on by another force, such as wind, or is at rest, [and] has reached its ground.”

Corn doesn’t stop growing even on windless days. CO2 is ≈50% heavier than air, so it sinks unless there is an outside force acting on it. When it reaches a leaf of corn, it is absorbed and the corn keeps growing, with new CO2 replenished by gravitation.

“unless we live in a continuous washing machine cycle, which I hadn’t noticed.. ”
The washing machine analogy is actually a pretty good description of how rapidly air is moving about in the atmosphere, if air was a dense as water you’d notice it more.

Lucy Skywalker – you probably didn’t see my correction before posting, I messed up, thought these were actual quotes as also reminded me of things I’d read in the emails, but they were extrapolated. I’ve just given up attempting a trawl through these … But one worth mentioning here is Phil Jones writing from Switzerland and the walks he’s taking in the deep snow, and how quickly the temperature drops when the sun goes down..

..perhaps someone could design an umbrella lined with CO2 to radiate back the body’s IR.

Any royalties will be gratefully received.

The American Thinker also has an analysis, looks like Phil Jones wasn’t really aware of how different his words were from previous statements made about this.

Thank you re the Science teaching, I have certainly thought that someone should write something. I dismissed myself as a candidate as I don’t have much of a record now of these discussions and I tend to get bogged down without the a.n.other to reply to. But pamphlet, keeping it short might just be the constraint I need. I’ll think about it.

Smokey – re Dyson, I had read him say this but a piece on the web not from his book. I don’t recall where he got it from, but have just found this page which shows it could have come from U.S. Department of Agriculture: http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5600

Plants do grow better when more CO2 is available for them, it’s a common practice to pump this into greenhouse production for healthier growth, and wind does stir it around as plants take CO2 in from the underside of their leaves through stomata. It doesn’t say on this page how long it is before it affects plants, but I have noticed in spells of hot still days that my lawn doesn’t need cutting as often as warm and wet, rain brings down CO2 and stirs things up, but maybe that’s just less water, or wishful thinking! Although they say that higher CO2 levels make plants more drought resistant. There’s a direct relationship to the stomata and CO2 levels, and there’s some work on tracking past CO2 levels from such analysis, showing more variation through time than ice data.

Andrew W – I refer you back to my original link of good science on ideal gases, which is very much at odds with the wiki piece.
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The wiki entry appears to be yet another AGW inspired botch of real science to include CO2 at all, and with some indeterminate ‘”reasonable tolerances'”to boot. No wonder there are so many young adults out there unable to grasp that CO2 has actual physical weight.

A good description you say “of how rapidly air is moving around in the atmosphere, if air was as dense as water you’d notice it more.”

It has? As far as I can see, the global temperature indexes all show significant warming 2000 to present.

You can make the trend nonsignificant for some indexes if you cherry-pick start and end years (starting in 1998 is popular for this purpose). But it takes statistical tricks like that to hide the incline.

Andrew W – yes that page. It makes the crucial point that ideal gases and their laws are purely Hypothetical, they do not actually exist in the Real world, which is full of real gases and subject to real gas laws and conditions on earth. For example, ideal gases do not have attraction or volume or interaction, real gases do.

I asked what you meant by atmosphere and air because I don’t know what you mean by them, and if we’re going to discuss this any further I’d like that clarified. You’ve already noted you mean something other when you said that “The washing machine analogy is actually a pretty good description of how rapidly air is moving about in the atmosphere,”, which is what I said it wasn’t. So we’re obviously talking about different things here.

What I mean by atmosphere is the gases surrounding the earth, having weight and subject to gravity, producing greater pressure the closer to the ground, and so on. This is not the same picture at all as if the air was in a continuous washing machine cycle, all thoroughly mixing up together ‘because the molecules travel at high speed around the atmosphere’, which is an ideal gas concept. Air exerts pressure and molecules of real gas are subject to attraction, the individual molecules might well be moving at great speeds, but ‘on the spot’ as it were, vibrating, not actually able to travel in air at these high ideal gas speeds.

For example, how sound travels is a good description of what I mean by air. The air isn’t actually moving but vibrating and so passing the vibration on, and once the pressure of sound has gone the volume of air will stop vibrating . In other words air is an entity in its own right, in which things happen, and not a mixture of molecules without weight or mass rushing around in all directions in empty space.